What’s the Point? Five Writers Offer Lifelines for Post-MFA Despair

A weird thing happened the other day. A writer-friend contacted me to say that she felt lost and low and miserable about writing. What’s the point? she wrote. Why the hell am I doing this?

In and of itself, the note wasn’t so strange. But consider this: I’ve gotten two other notes like it in the last month, all from writers a couple of years removed from their MFA programs.

Most MFA grads know about the rough patch that often hits the first six months after the program. You feel burned-out and disconnected, and you have to adjust to life without deadlines and mentors and all that esprit de corps. My pastor-friend calls this a “coming down from the mountaintop” experience. For a lot of grads, this is the end: they never write again.

Many of the writers who slog on find themselves in another trough. Somewhere between two-to-four years out of your MFA program, you realize that no one is reading your work: it’s either not getting accepted for publication or it’s landing in obscure lit magazines that few people read. You get tired of answering your super-supportive Uncle Frank, who, every time he sees you, says, “How’s that novel coming along?” which is like every two weeks, and when you say, “Heh. It’s coming,” he offers up some bit of advice, most of which can be boiled down to Be more like Stephen King.

Maybe you thought there would be more by now. Maybe you thought, by this time, you would have “arrived”—whatever that means to you.

Ha.

Call this the “falling into the crevasse” experience. Like the tumble off that first mountaintop, it’s going to claim some (professional) lives. But some writers will climb on out. How do they do it? Are there any lifelines out there?

To find out, I’ve reached out to some of my favorite writers. I asked them all the same question: When fellow writers tell you they feel lost and down and like What’s the point?, what do you tell them?

Whatever the cause of the despair, the basic strategy is always: try your best not to think it means anything. It’s just a natural part of being a writer. Sit with it. Tolerate it. And don’t assume that the only way through a bad patch is to be banging away at the keyboard, diligently, every day—as so many advise. Sometimes what’s needed is a break. Do some gardening. Take a walk. Despair is in some sense the result of thinking things have to be a certain way, a fixation of a kind—so challenge those assumptions and do something that breaks your idea of what you’re supposed to do to make this writing thing “succeed.” Or even of what constitutes success.

A. Taking a day off is okay. Sometimes despair is cured by a little rest and getting your blood sugar up.

B. Nobody else can write the book you can. Nobody. And the only way you will discover things is by writing your way to them.

C. Read Flaubert’s letters. He was a world-class whiner. If he could piss and moan that much about the book that became Madame Bovary, then all of us have license to feel bad about our work—but keep writing anyway.

Isak Dinesen recommended writing “a little every day, without hope, without despair.” I wish I could embody that sentiment. On my worst days, however, I think: Easy for you, Baroness. (Is it easier to write when one is wealthy and aristocratic? Or did that great philosopher of the 1990s, Christopher George Latore Wallace, have it right when he posited that “mo money” elicits “mo problems,” a hypothesis I hope to one day test?)

There’s that word again: hope. We hope for readers. We hope for critical and commercial success, even when we know it’s not good to harbor such thoughts. With that hope must come despair, though, the scarred other side of the artist’s coin. It’s easy to walk into a bookstore, glance across towering shelves of books written by thousands of authors, and think, What’s the point? How do I fit into this? Dozens and dozens of authors I know are troubled enough about their own work to question the central role or purpose of writing in their lives. If a writer is just getting started, it’s hard for hope to win out. There is no shame in quitting, if that’s what you decide. Don Kurtz, the author of my favorite novel, South of the Big Four, wrote another book and then called it quits. He’s happier, he says, than when he was writing every day.

In my own experience, hope wins out because I am too stubborn (and/or stupid) to quit now. There’s a fire inside that keeps burning. When it’s only embers, I don’t write much, or even at all, and that’s OK. Antidepressants help, too—I am willing to bet that the use of antidepressants among writers is higher than, say, landscapers or lawyers.

You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for your agent, your editor, the prize committees or tenure committees, your spouse, friends or pretty strangers. When you question what the point of writing is, you’re really thinking about other people. Stop thinking about other people. Seriously. What have they done for you lately? Write for yourself. Because you get something out of it, even if it’s just the small pleasure of one sentence locking into place. Because you are interested in the workings of language and stories and history and people. Because you can, even when you think you can’t.

Figure out a way to make it fun, because if you don’t enjoy writing—actually sitting there and doing it, getting lost in it—or if you only do it for the external validation, then you’re sunk.

I honestly wasn’t sure if I could write another book after The Circus in Winter, wasn’t sure I had another book in me, and then one day, the Colts lost to the Steelers in the playoffs, and I was full of this inexplicable emotion. I started writing an encouraging note to the Colts players, and the next thing I knew, I was writing and laughing and having a grand old time. That’s when I knew I could write more books. So, hip hip hooray! Eureka! I’m saved! And I have so much fun writing my next book, Comeback Season. And it bombs.

I thought, “What is the point? Can I really put myself through this again?” I honestly wasn’t sure. I read this essay by Andre Dubus over and over, particularly the last paragraph. And it was during this time of despair that I read a biography of Cole Porter, who was born in my hometown. We think Cole’s career must have been one sparkling success after another, but the truth is, he got panned. A lot. Sometimes, he’d get so depressed, he needed electroshock treatments. I read that and thought, “Man, do I know how you feel,” and boom: I knew I had another book in me, and I was having fun again, and I had an answer to the question, “What’s the point?” Because if Cole had stopped after his first failure, or his tenth, we wouldn’t have these songs.

(For an extended take on a similar question, see Cathy’s excellent blog post, “Am I a Writer?”)

I think we’re all sort of stuck in limbo until the book actually emerges from the ether, but even when it does, only sometimes does anything actually change. Fame and fortune rarely follow, but at least we have something tangible to document our toil (by which I mean something to prove to our parents that dropping the pre-med major wasn’t the worst idea ever).

I suppose my only real advice for this involves the word solidarity. That this is a limbo we’ve all faced, one that many of us continue to face, and that there’s nothing wrong with doing what 95% of the writing world does—working a day job and writing by night (sort of superhero-like, right?).

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Bryan Furunessis the author of the novel The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson. His stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Southeast Review, Hobart and elsewhere, including New Stories from the Midwest and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches at Butler University, and is the editor-in-chief of the small press, Pressgang.

When I decided to opt-out of going for the MFA, I was torn. Now I’m not. If you work your tush off, and I mean FOR A LONG TIME, and you have something to say, in a unique way, things will come together. But this field takes a commitment that is almost beyond what the spirit can often endure. That’s my take on things.

Yesterday I was in a post-MFA miasma (which still frequently happens 2 years out), driving home from work and wondering what the point of sitting down again at home to write after 8 hours at the office would bring me. Then it struck me: the work is good. Writing, that is. It’s so hard to find work that really feels good, that feels worthy, and that is reason enough for me. I don’t need to think beyond it. The work is good and so I’ll write, despite my doubting and 9-5 job and everything else. I don’t need to come up with some grand philosophy or profound reason to write. The work is good. That’s enough.

[…] dealing with the difficulties of life after an MFA program. (And if you think we’re alone, read this). One of the main problems is that you go from a world of time, focus, and support to a world in […]

So one thing has struck me in the years and years since my 1990 MFA. Yes, I went into that first trough. And the second crevasse too. And I am still a writer. Compulsively so.

But you need that moment of surveying the landscape critically, and asking yourself, what am I adding to the world of arts and letters? My careerism and boosterism and schmoozing editors adds very little to the greater body of words written in the world. But reflecting and thinking enough to have something significant to say surely does.

One other thing, it seems to me, adds very little to the body of words in the world. That’s the 10,000 hours of practice admonition for aspiring writers to write every day. I know the theory, that most days you write drivel, but you gotta be sitting at your keyboard or with pen in hand for those moments when lightning strikes and brilliance flows out of you.

BS, I say. I think that admonition has produced groaning shelves of published books (groups of books, cadres of books, not simply individual books– whole SECTIONS OF BOOKSTORES) that should have never been written. Wanker books. Books I gotta write cuz I gotta write a book books. Books that are the equivalent of doing the scales over and over again at the piano. Finger exercises are getting published, because we living in a production-oriented culture. You can’t just write. You have to produce. Because I can’t be writing all these pages and pages of words every day just to throw them away!

Just like you think you have to clean your plate before you leave the table.

It’s why masturbation just isn’t quite as much fun as actual sex. That’s what most of the published books out there feel like to me. Wanking. Sorry if I’m insulting anyone.

What if all these ARMIES of people were not generating pages and pages every day? Let them still write! Let them still write regularly! Let them still keep diaries! Commonplace books. Write journals for English classes. Write through difficult issues for their therapist.

And let them actually PRODUCE stories they would want to read, would feel compelled to read. Memorable stories. Stories that feel like real sex, not masterful masturbation. Or forced, exercise-driven page production (can you feel the foregone guilt, the righteous discipline, the chest-thumping time spent, dripping between the lines?).

Anybody really wonder why memoirs are so much more interesting for readers to engage than fiction? Especially more than literary fiction? Because for all the honed, bored competence of literary fiction, the more raw, less finely-honed, less perfectly written stories in memoirs are more interesting! Stuff actually happens in those stories, and some of it doesn’t even feel like the reader is walking into some finely-constructed trap.

I blaspheme. But I have just decided, finally, that blaspheming is allowed.

Thank you Chris Boese for being there – thank all of you!
To read this and confirm again that I’m not alone, I have procrastinated – again – from continuing to write something that made me feel good while writing it – so good that I can’t get off the mark – again — a pattern for years now.
As for the easy – or not so easy – “out” I cannot quit writing or even give up the down from procrastinating because my head is always writing when my body won’t stop to record it – so I talk too much instead – and then feel worse. But as I write this at this moment, I know someone reading this knows what I mean – and that feels better.

I think one of the best pieces on this problem remains Ted Solotaroff’s “Writing Out in the Cold: The First Ten Years.” Here’s a snippet: “It doesn’t appear to be a matter of talent itself. Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared. As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability: that is, the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment, from within as well as from without.”

As for the future of publishing, I very much like Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books (available from Paul Dry Books).

after three books of poetry and 15 years of writing every day(one book published)i decided to drop writing for my own mental health and happiness…and i don’t feel bad about it…somehow publishing the book scooped out all the desire i have for writing. i’m done. but i’m going back to photography which gets me out and about. i think one needs something creative to do, that’s for sure. Mordecai Richler was asked one time what it was like writing the novel. he said ‘it was four years in a room’. i feel lucky to have escaped that fate… check out my photos at http://www.judedillon.com there’s always a possibility i may come back to writing but i feel at the moment that it is a closed chapter and not a bitter one…

Boy, I sure needed this today. Now I don’t feel so bad about feeling so bad b/c I’ve put my latest writing project on hold and don’t know quite why. And that day job thing — well, it is the end of the semester for this comm. coll. adjunct. Maybe I just need some good old-fashioned R&R. Even we writers must rest sometimes.

Ned, thanks for the reminder of the Solotaroff essay. I love that essay, and his whole collection (highly recommended) A FEW GOOD VOICES IN MY HEAD. Here’s another snippet from that essay that I printed out and taped to my wall for when I was feeling low:

“The writer’s defense is his power of self-objectivity, his interest in otherness, and his faith in the the process itself, which enables him to write on into the teeth of his doubts and then to improve it. In the scars of his struggle between the odd, sensitive side of the self that wants to write and the practical, socialized one that wants results, [the writer] is likely to find his true sense of vocation. Moreover, writing itself, if it is not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts diffuse anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer’s main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer’s main means of relating to otherness. Similary, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger. Because all this takes time, indeed most of a lifetime, to compete itself, [the writer] has to learn that his main task is to persist.”

[…] the need to step back or step away from what you love most is an integral part of the pilgrimage: What’s the Point? Five Writers Offer Lifelines for Post-MFA Despair. Colorado Susan, thanks for sharing this link. It’s just what I […]

I came across this site quite by accident and I know it was not designed with me in mind. Over 45 years ago I graduated with an Industrial Management degree and have never worked a day in my life in this field. So the first bit of good news is you are not alone if everything isn’t exactly working out as planned.
What I did do was become a mailman. And I continued to write about anything and everything that caught my interest. Towards the end of my career I wrote a novel about the Postal Service and after that I wrote another novel based on an idea that popped into my head around 40 years ago. Neither book is breaking any records but the good news is since writing has never been a job it carries none of the risks that jobs do.
If you like to write then write. That is the only thing you can control. You can earn money doing a wide range of things but writing should always be about saying something you want to say.

Funny, I don’t hear lamentations from the writer’s without MFA crowd. We just write. Yes, there are other difficulties, but these are common to all writers. MFA programs seem to breed mental patients. Just write. Why become a headcase about it. Take a graduate degree in something else that doesn’t cause acute navel gazing and revolving doors through a confessional. Did you forget your reasons for breathing like a writer? You have a story to tell. Get it out and get over yourself. I think I need to watch tv now.

Doug Kurtz is still writing. He came out with a novel called ‘mosquito’ and is working on another novel. He teaches writing at The Lighthouse writers Workshop in denver as well as coaches at Write Life Coaching, which he launched a couple years ago.